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Using Pinterest Analytics for Your Business

Social media giant Pinterest got its start as a visually-based image sharing platform, allowing users to swap pictures of hair tutorials and fashion ideas. The network’s popularity soon took off, attracting the interest of commercial entities as well as millions of new users. Now Pinterest has introduced a whole bevy of analytical tools for the network, allowing businesses to track how many users are pinning from their site, the amount of views for each pin, and all incoming views that are routed from Pinterest.

This development is intriguing for online marketers on a number of levels. It has long been argued that outside of traditional SEO and social media efforts, it is nearly impossible to objectively gauge the effectiveness of online branding efforts. With Pinterest’s tools, businesses can now track who is interacting with their images and how, as well as how likely these users are to convert to full customers.

Developing Pinterest for Business

As a business owner, it is the responsibility of the user to make shareable material and poise it for maximum success on the network. However, it’s also Pinterest’s responsibility to make their service as simple as possible to push the material out in front of the public eye. With prestigious brands such as the Smithsonian Institute being early adopters of the service, the pressure to make Pinterest a commercial-friendly platform was immense.

The Pinterest for Business suite was launched in late 2012, heralding a new array of capabilities for commercial users. New widgets for seamless integration into commercial websites, site verification badges, and even a comprehensive best-practices guide were all made available. Now the ability to measure the outcome of your efforts is easy to access and intuitive to interpret.

Checking the Numbers

The new analytics suite offers a huge variety of metrics by which to measure success. Each individual pin has its own set of impressions and repins (essentially, views and shares). Additionally, the Pinterest presence of one’s overall site can be evaluated in terms of its strength on the network — that is, how many images are being circulated at any given time.

Fluidly tracking the social life cycle of a viral image from beginning to end is a dream come true for Internet marketers. For example, a British clothier may pay special attention to people who pin the image of a certain blouse to their boards (impressions), direct their followers to visit their site (impression), and end up buying that exact blouse (conversion). A firm who prides themselves on offering the best web design services could take a slightly different tack, commissioning an informative infographic on crime recidivism and tracking how many eyeballs that graphic brings to their flagship website.

Targeting the Audience

From a commercial perspective, analyzing the movement and attention-drawing possibilities of a single image is invaluable in laser-focusing efforts on the desired demographic. If a certain color scheme isn’t working for the 18-24 year old females that an up-and-coming shoe designer wants to attract, it may be time to try something else. If images of flashy cars are working unexpectedly well on the older family demographic of sophisticated interior designers, then they can ramp up that imagery to great effect.

Social media is constantly changing, and that means that the savvy business owner will be keeping up with the times. With the increased pressure to market online, it’s a sure thing that more and more commercial outfits will be taking full advantage of every tool available to them to find out exactly what their ideal customer wants to see and when they want to see it.

No matter what the product or audience, specific and engaging content is the key to attracting brand loyalty. The new Pinterest analytics suite is just one way to find out about this information and keep momentum going in the right direction.

Michelle is an aspiring writer with a passion for the Internet, specifically blogging and social media. She loves how social media connects people across the globe, and appreciates that blogging gives her the opportunity to voice her thoughts and share advice with an unlimited audience. Follow her on Twitter or Google+.

Hi Jeremy – It’s really not as complicated as you’d think! The best advice I can give is to go into your Pinterest analytics and just play around with it for a bit, familiarize yourself with the data, how it’s organized, what each measurement means, and then begin figuring out how you can benefit from it.

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